A Hero to Come Home To

by Marilyn Pappano

  She gave him two thumbs-up. “Sounds like a plan.”

  One she could eagerly embrace. If he stuck around as long as there were projects to help with, the work on her house would never be finished. She would make sure of that.

  When he finished rubbing her right foot, she groaned. “That feels so good. Kick your shoes off and stick your feet up here. I’ll return the favor.”

  The strangest expression crossed his face—panic, she might have thought—and he shook his head. “Thanks but no, thanks. I’m fine.”

  He wouldn’t get any argument from her about that.

  Chapter Twelve

  You want to go into town for dinner?”

  Noah looked as if Dalton had suggested they flap their arms and fly to the moon. Quickly he adjusted his expression, though, and said, “Sure. I like Mom’s casseroles, but I sure wouldn’t mind having a big greasy burger hot off the grill. Get changed and let’s go.”

  Dalton’s first impulse was to ask why he should change, but he knew the answer without even looking. There was a time his mother would have swatted him if he’d even thought of leaving the house looking like this. His jeans were the rattiest, oldest pair he owned, with both knees worn clear through and jagged rips along one leg where he’d gotten caught up on a nail in the barn. His T-shirt was pretty old, too, from a trip he’d taken his sophomore year in high school. The writing had flaked until only a letter here or there was legible.

  Upstairs in his room, he shucked the boots and clothes in exchange for his newest jeans, a plain white shirt and his good boots. He tucked the shirt into his jeans, slid a leather belt through the loops and went into the bathroom to comb his hair and take a look.

  The image gazing at him from the mirror was painfully familiar: brown hair, brown eyes, skin tanned from so much time outside. The lines around his eyes and mouth made him look older, wearier, much more like his father than he should look at this age.

  Was Dillon out there somewhere, staring into a similar version of the same face? Did he ever look at himself and think about home, about Mom and Dad and Dalton and Noah? He could have come back any time in the first couple years after he’d left, and everything would have been okay, but he was too selfish. Too irresponsible. Maybe too ashamed.

  As he should be.

  Dalton rubbed one hand across his jaw, feeling the stubble there, wondering for just a moment if he should have shaved when he’d showered. It was Saturday night, after all, and he was fixed up every other way.

  But he was only going into town to eat. Not to have fun. Not to do anything that might require him to look more reasonably presentable.

  Damn well not because of his last trip into town.

  Scowling, he flipped the light switch and headed down the hall to the stairs. That last trip had been a major mistake. He’d spent the first twenty-four hours feeling sick over it, and the six days since pretending it hadn’t happened.

  He hadn’t taken flowers to Sandra’s grave.

  He hadn’t met Jessy Lawrence.

  He hadn’t gone to Bubba’s with her.

  God, he wished he hadn’t gone to bed with her.

  But he had. He’d done all those things. And even now, as he took his Stetson from the hook beside the door and clamped it on his head, as he locked up behind them, as he and Noah climbed into the truck and started the drive into Tallgrass, he couldn’t help but wonder if he went to Bubba’s again, would she be there?

  And if he did, if they shared a few drinks again, would they wind up in the same place?

  Brutal honesty forced him to admit that the knot in his gut wasn’t entirely disgust for what they’d done. Four years was a long time to go without sex. Man wasn’t meant to be celibate, Dillon used to say.

  Granted, in Dillon’s mind, man wasn’t meant to be faithful, either. He’d had no boundaries, not in his own relationship or anyone else’s.

  “You heard from Mom and Dad?”

  Dalton glanced at Noah, so quiet on the other side that he’d practically forgotten he was there. “They’re in Wyoming. Mom said tell you to listen to your voice mail from time to time.”

  He could practically hear the eye-roll in Noah’s voice. “Everyone knows if you want me to notice, you should email or text.”

  “I don’t text.”

  “Yeah, well, you don’t call, either.”

  That was true. Dalton couldn’t remember the last time he’d made a phone call that hadn’t involved ranch business. It probably would have been a few months after Sandra’s funeral, when he’d called her parents just to…to connect with someone who’d known her even better than he had. Her mom had started crying so hard the moment he’d identified himself that her father had taken the phone, and he’d cried, too. The call had put Dalton in a bad place, when he’d already been barely functioning.

  He hadn’t reached out to anyone since. That was a long time to be so alone. No wonder he’d screwed up so bad with Jessy Lawrence.

  The highway was widening into a street, better paved and better lit, when Noah spoke again. “Where we going?”

  “What do you want?”

  “How about that little café downtown? The one with the pot roast like Granny’s?”

  Their grandmother had died when Noah was ten, but it wasn’t a surprise that he thought of food when he thought of her. Pot roast had been a Sunday routine, with no exceptions but Christmas, along with meat loaf on Fridays, snow ice cream with every heavy fall and oatmeal-raisin cookies any time her grandchildren visited. Food had been her way of showing she loved them. Not many hugs or kisses, but lots of homemade treats.

  Dalton responded with a grunt as he turned east a block before Main. On a Saturday night, the only parking near Serena’s was going to be on the side streets. He parked in the sole spot in front of the newspaper office, blocked on each side by driveways running back from the street, and they headed toward Main.

  It was a nice night, warm early for the season but with enough of a bite to make Noah’s jacket comfortable. Dalton didn’t mind the chill, though. Just the air from his brother who’d suddenly decided to fill him in on his last week at school was enough to keep him warm.

  Tallgrass’s downtown didn’t close up and go dark on Saturday nights, at least not all of it. There were restaurants, a gym, a couple clubs, and a few small shops that stayed open late to benefit from the others’ business. Muttering “uh-huh” in the appropriate places in Noah’s monologue, he glanced in the store windows as they passed, almost stumbling when he caught a glimpse of a redhead at the back of the gym.

  She disappeared behind a machine, then reappeared an instant later: tall, muscular, hair too short. Not Jessy.

  His heart thundering in his chest, he reminded himself of why he’d stiffened. He never wanted to see her again. Wanted to forget he ever had seen her.

  “So what do you think?” Noah asked.

  “About what?”

  Noah’s sigh was heavy with impatience. “Me going to summer school. Do you never listen to anything I say?”

  The desire to grin cut through Dalton like wind-driven fire across a dry prairie. It seemed odd and felt odder, as if the muscles in his face had forgotten how to make that action. He popped his brother on the back of the head, just hard enough to let him know he’d been popped. “You sound just like Mom. ‘Do you ever listen to anything I say? No, of course not, and then you come whining wanting your father and me to get you out of trouble.’”

  “I didn’t get into that much trouble,” Noah muttered before catching sight of Dalton’s grin. He stared, first in surprise, then narrowed his gaze. It stayed that way until they’d been seated against the back wall at Serena’s. They’d asked for a table. The booths were close quarters and they always wound up kicking each other for space underneath because of their long legs and Noah’s big feet.

  “So what’s up with you, man?”

  The grin was long gone, and Dalton’s face had settled back into a more comfortable scowl. “What do you
mean?”

  “You were weird last weekend, and you’re weird this weekend. Wanting to come to town for dinner? Smiling like you used to?” A light lit Noah’s eyes. “Did you meet someone last Saturday? What did you do while you were gone all day?”

  Dalton flipped through the menu though he would order what he always did: the pot roast that was, like Noah said, the closest they would ever get to Granny’s. After a moment of silence, he met his brother’s gaze. “I took flowers to Sandra’s grave.”

  There was a time when Noah’s response would have been predictable: For all frickin’ day? Unbelievable as it sounded, he knew Dalton had done just that a time or two in the beginning. He also knew of plenty of times when Dalton had visited a bar after the grave, when someone had called him hours later to drag his brother’s sorry ass home.

  He and Noah might not be the twins in the family, but Noah knew him as well as—better than Dillon.

  The waitress came to take their orders, then brought pop for both of them. “It’s a shame they don’t serve beer here,” Noah remarked. “That’s my favorite drink with a burger. It makes the finishing touch to the meal.”

  “You’re not old enough to legally drink.”

  Noah shrugged. “Minor technicality.”

  “Yeah, you’re the minor.”

  “And you’re a major pain. Sorry to not tiptoe around you for once, but I’m gonna say it anyway. You need to get laid, Dalton. Maybe then you wouldn’t be moping around all the time acting so tortured.”

  Noah looked defensive, obviously expecting something major from him—a blowup, maybe even walking out and leaving him to find his own way home. There was a minute of anger where Dalton considered doing just that. But the earlier words stopped him. “Sorry not to tiptoe around you for once.” Noah had been doing that, and so had their parents, for a long time. They’d given him space and time to grieve, and he was still taking both all these years later. It had come to feel natural to him, but it wasn’t, not really.

  He was the adult, the older brother to Noah’s kid. If anyone should be doing any caretaking, it was him, but instead he spent his time dwelling on Sandra and himself.

  It was okay to grieve. He didn’t need anyone to tell him that. But it wasn’t okay to wallow in it to the point that his family had to change who they were to accommodate him.

  Aware that Noah was waiting for a response, Dalton breathed deeply. “I don’t recall ever asking you to tiptoe around me.” No doubt, though, his behavior had demanded it. He’d been on the edge for so long, refusing to talk about Sandra, refusing to talk, period. “But feel free to go back to being the pesky little brother you always were. I wouldn’t want you to fall off those tiptoes and hurt something. I’ve got enough critters to take care of already.”

  Noah continued to stare at him, still a little challenging and a little confused. After a long silence, he finally said, “Right. For your information, if I fall and hurt something, I don’t need you to take care of me. Two of the most gorgeous women I’ve ever seen live in the apartment across the hall from me, and they are both just aching to take me on. Let me tell you…”

  His smugness was familiar—a perfect mimic of their missing brother. Dalton wondered if Noah had always had the attitude and he just hadn’t seen it because everyone had been treating him like fragile glass, or if Noah had picked it up from Dillon. The kid had been barely seven when Dillon took off. For the two years before then, Dillon had been too busy letting every girl in the county catch him to spend much time with the rest of the family, and he’d had no patience for a little kid.

  What other things, Dalton wondered, had he missed seeing in Noah because he’d been too absorbed in himself?

  Noah was a ladies’ man, he learned when they went to pay. There was a crowd at the door, people waiting for seats or to pick up carry-out orders, others trying to pay. While Dalton settled the bill, he heard Noah talking a few feet away. He didn’t need to understand the words to know his little brother had met a pretty woman. That came out in the tone, his laughter, hell, in the air that surrounded him. Dalton was probably in for a drive to the house alone, with the rest of the evening on his own. That was fine with him.

  Then, after shoving his wallet back into his pocket, he took the few steps to reach his brother, getting close enough to see around Noah’s broad shoulders to the short, slender woman the kid was charming: abbreviated clothing to show lots of smooth golden skin, a mouth worth kissing, green eyes, red hair.

  Dalton’s gut tightened. It was Jessy Lawrence.

  She glanced up at him—he was hard to ignore, looming over her and Noah, surprised and embarrassed and, someplace where he didn’t quite have to admit it, pleased to see her again—then her gaze slid back to his brother as if he weren’t there. Not even the slightest flicker of recognition, good or bad, crossed her pretty face, and her words flowed without so much as a hitch.

  Anger built inside him, knotting his fists, creeping across his face in a steel-cold scowl. Either she was deliberately ignoring him or she didn’t recognize him. Was she embarrassed by what they’d done? Didn’t appear so, not the way she was touching Noah’s arm and smiling at him as if she were parched and he was a long tall drink. Could she have been so drunk that she didn’t remember Dalton even though she’d been sober when they met?

  Either way he was relieved, or so he told himself. Last Saturday had been a huge mistake. The best thing either of them could do was pretend it had never happened.

  But all this heat and tension didn’t feel like relief.

  “Come on, Noah.” Dalton didn’t care that he’d interrupted Jessy midsentence. “Let’s go.”

  “Hold on.” Noah’s expression was his usual charm-the-girls smile with a heaping helping of I-can’t-believe-I-got-this-lucky excitement. “Jessy was just suggesting—”

  “We’ve got work to do.” Dalton clamped his fingers on his brother’s arm and pulled him toward the door. He’d be lucky to make it five feet out the door before Noah exploded and demanded to know what the hell was wrong with him, but Dalton didn’t care.

  He wasn’t sharing another woman with either of his brothers.

  After work Tuesday, Carly stopped at Walmart to pick up Easter gifts for her nieces and nephews. Buying for Eleanor was easy; she liked what any little girl liked. The four boys would much prefer chemistry sets, equipment or possibly a little yellow-cake uranium for their latest experiments, but they’d accepted there was only so much their aunt Carly could or would do.

  After gathering toys, sweets, games, and cards, she was on her way to find shipping boxes when she passed a display of plastic storage tubs. Her feet slowly came to a stop as she looked at them. Big, tight-fitting lids, decent protection for whatever they held, like clothes. Uniforms. Jeff’s uniforms.

  A gasp tried to escape her, but the tightness of her throat strangled it into nothing more than a small sound. It was too early to pack away Jeff’s things.

  It had been twenty-six months.

  But he’d left them in the closet, right where he wanted them.

  And he wasn’t coming back. He had no need of them. And it didn’t matter whether the clothes stayed in the closet. He was in her heart and always would be.

  She was wiggling an orange tub from the stack when a thought occurred to her: Had this idea suddenly come into her head because it was time…or because of Dane?

  She yanked hard on the tub, and it popped out, sending the rest of the stack tumbling to the floor. When she whirled around, she hit the pile of lids and they fell, too, scattering across the tile.

  “And here I thought I was the only one who created messes like this in public.” Ilena pushed her cart out of the way among racks of sales clothes, then bent to pick up a few lids. “Thank you for assuring me I’m not the only klutz in the world.”

  “Happy to serve.” Carly picked up the rest, balancing four tubs and lids on her shopping cart before straightening the rest. “Why aren’t you at work? Are you and Hector oka
y?”

  Ilena patted her stomach. “We’re fine. Dr. Madill just said so.” She wiggled her fingers in the direction of Carly’s cart. “Easter shopping. What fun. I’m spending this Easter with Juan’s family in Broken Arrow. They color about ten dozen eggs. Of course, they have five dozen grandchildren.”

  An exaggeration, Carly knew, though she did remember some mention of Juan’s eight siblings and more than twenty grandkids. Quite a change for only-child Ilena.

  Ilena eyed the bins. “Doing a little spring cleaning?”

  “I, uh, I’m packing up Jeff’s uniforms. Maybe. I think. Soon.” Her voice trembled on the last few words. “Do you think it’s too soon?”

  Ilena’s smile was tinged with sadness. “We all have to figure out what our own ‘too soon’ is. I gave Juan’s uniforms to his brother who’s in the Army about a month after the service, and his other brothers and nephews took the rest of his clothes. My mother said it was too early, but like Juan’s mom said, he doesn’t need them anymore.”

  Carly had still been pretty much nonfunctioning a month after Jeff’s funeral. She’d barely been able to dress herself. Dealing with his clothing would have been impossible.

  “It depends on what brings you comfort, Carly. I have a friend whose husband died in 2004. She’s still got his stuff everywhere. Marti’s and Lucy’s husbands died together, and Marti still has Joshua’s things while Lucy cleaned out Mike’s on the first anniversary of his death.” Ilena shrugged. “You do it when it feels right for you, not because someone else thinks it’s right.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, she asked, “Is Dane pushing you?”

  “No. Oh, no. He’s never mentioned…He understands…” Any time you want to talk, I don’t mind listening, he’d told her. He would never pressure her. She was sure of that. “I just thought…it occurred to me…” She blew out her breath, then combed her hair back. “I’m dating another man. Maybe it’s time.” Self-consciously she twisted her wedding band. “It’s not like I’m sleeping with one of Jeff’s shirts or—or standing in the closet with my face buried in his coat. The clothes are there, just like the furniture and the light fixtures. I don’t need them to remember him.”